American celebrity talk show host Ellen DeGeneres recently recounted her harrowing ordeal of having been sexually assaulted as a teen by her stepfather. The 61-year-old comedian opened up to David Letterman on his show and revealed how her mother's then-husband assaulted her sexually when she was '15 or 16.'

The abuse allegedly began after her mother, Betty, was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was when her mother was out of town, the first of many such incidences took place.

"He told me... he'd felt a lump in her breast and needed to feel my breasts because he didn't want to upset her, but he needed to feel mine," she said, as per the excerpts of the interview with Letterman carried by US media.

"Anyway, he convinced me that he needs to feel my breasts and then he tries to do it again another time, and then another time he tries to break my door down and I kicked the window out and ran 'cause I knew it was going to go more to something," she added.

"It's a really horrible, horrible story and the only reason I'm actually going to go into detail about it is because I want other girls to not ever let someone do that," DeGeneres said, reports said. 

"And I like men, but there are so many men that get away with so much," she was further cited as telling Letterman by the news agency. Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian in 1997 and had later spoken about the abuse in an interview with Allure magazine in 2005.

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